The lost cinemas of castle park: A cinemapping experience

The Lost Cinemas of Castle Park is a smartphone app which enables you to discover the hidden history of Bristol's cinema-going past, by using your GPS position to trigger context-specific stories whilst you explore what used to be the heart of Bristol's commercial district before the Blitz. You'll hear about some of the city's lost cinemas - including The Tivoli, where the first "moving pictures" were shown in 1896, The Bio-Pictureland, a converted Baptist Chapel, The Queens Hall, the first purpose-built cinema, The Dolphin with its screen bordered in blue velvet, The Gem a "fleapit" which later became an illegal boxing den, the huge "supercinema", The Regent, the seedy Europa - and one extant art-deco masterpiece, The Odeon, still operating since 1938.
Celebrating cinema-going through the ages, each cinema is brought to life with dramatisations, stories and memories, archive images and sound effects creating a nostalgic cinematic experience which interacts poignantly with the physical location as it is now. There is also the facility to find out what's on at a cinema nearby and add your own cinema memories and comments by using the Twitter function.
The app was developed out of the AHRC REACT Hub 'Know Your Place / CineMap Layer' 'Heritage Sandbox' scheme which resulted in the Cinemapping prototype - The Lost Cinemas of Castle Park will be made available as a published ap as a way to showcase the research for the 'Heritage Sandbox' launch in September 2012 to a wider audience and as a demo of how the rest of the Cinemapping App could be developed with further funding..

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council <http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Pages/default.aspx> (AHRC), REACT (Research and Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technology) is one of four UK Knowledge Exchange Hubs for the Creative Economy and is a collaboration between UWE Bristol (the University of the West of England <http://www.uwe.ac.uk/> ), Watershed <http://www.watershed.co.uk/> and the Universities of Bath <http://www.bath.ac.uk/> , Bristol <http://www.bris.ac.uk/> , Cardiff <http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/> and Exeter <http://www.exeter.ac.uk/> .